eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

February 2016

02/29/2016

In episode of season five of Downton Abbey, Lord Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, figures out a secret that his wife, his daughter, his sister, his mother, and one of his tenant’s had kept him in the dark about. His wife, the Lady Grantham informs him that particular members of the family do not know and that he should leave it to the secret keepers to tell. She asks him not to tell any of the others that he knows. To this request, he says, rather generously, that he intends to maintain the silence.

“Very well. I must admit that it is an unusual sensation to learn that there is a secret in this house I am actually privy to but I will be silent if you wish.”

The poignancy of this act is somewhat more profound than it might seem on the surface because, in fact, every plot line, every story arch, every scene almost has some aspect of this dynamic at work. Everyone in Downton Abbey has a secret they want to keep to themselves at some point and everyone finds out about someone else’s secret and must decide who to tell and not tell. If you are a fan of the series, I would challenge you to a game. How many character’s secrets can you think of off the top of your head?

What are Mary Crawley’s secrets? Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

What are Edith Crawley’s secrets?

Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

What are Lord Robert Crawley’s secrets? Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

What are Lady Cora Crawley’s secrets? Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

What were Sybil’s secrets? Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

What are Tom Branson’s secrets? Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

What are Matthew Crawley’s secrets?

Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

What are cousin Rose MacClare’s secrets?

Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

What are Violet Crawley’s secrets?

Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

What are Lady Isobel Painswick’s secrets?

Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

Ask yourself the same questions about all the downstairs characters as well What are Carson’s secrets? Who knows about them and who remains in the dark?

Even the pig farmer, Timothy Drewe has a whopping secret that he keeps from his wife. They all have secrets and yet they all live in this one community - indeed, one house that, though palatial, is not large enough to keep a secret in forever. Notice how characters are constantly walking in on one another in the middle of conversations or overhearing each other. Notice how many times you see people reflected in mirrors or through glass. Some, like Barrow, have their antennas out, seeking the abbey’s subterranean conversation waves for gossip, rumor, and scuttlebutt. Some stumble onto the secrets unaware without looking. Others are, like Robert Crawley, blind to just about all of them until almost the end, though they happen right before their very noses.

Someone has a wife. Someone was divorced. Someone is getting a divorce. Someone is ill. Someone has a prison record. Someone was raped. Someone knows who it was. Someone is gay. Someone had an affair. Someone is in love with the chauffeur. Someone had a nephew who dissented during the war. Someone used to be in the theater. Someone had a child out of wedlock. Someone had a fling with an African American jazz singer. Someone is trying to sabotage a wedding. Someone is broke. Someone is in love with someone else’s beau. Someone is sneaking out of the house. Someone may have caused Lady Grantham to miscarry. Someone had a short indiscretion with a lady’s maid. Someone is sneaking into someone else’s room at night. Someone knows where Robert Crawley’s dog is. Someone has a book about birth control in her night stand. Someone has married someone she does not love out of pity. Someone has adopted the neighbor’s illegitimate child without telling their spouse. Someone burns evidence. And so on and so on. The costumes in the show are stunning but everyone wears fig leaves.

We all wear fig leaves. "Oh you who use words," says Orson Scott Card, "You are such liars."

Question for Comment: The engines that the plot lines of Downton Abbey run on are love, change, and secrets. The whole thing is an exploration of how people live together over time by hiding from one another and by strategically revealing themselves to each other as they wander through their individual pilgrimages in life, hiding from shame - seeking acceptance. Think of your own little Downton Abbey. What secrets do you hide from others? Who has figured them out? Who hasn’t? What secrets of others in life do you know? What keeps you from betraying confidences? What secrets are being kept from you? Is it best that you not know them?

02/20/2016

Rose opens his book by telling us about a rash of crashes experienced by the United States in the 1930’s. The crashes were not being caused by mechanical failure and all the pilots were well trained. Investigations led to the conclusion that problem had to do with the way that pilots were not fitting into the cockpits. “How could that be?” the engineers argued. They were built to fit the average pilot perfectly. The problem was that those averages were the result of a dozen or so different measurements and what they found was that in actuality, out of 4063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all dimensions. “The average is completely useless,” Rose concludes, and in this case, fatal. “There was no such thing as an average pilot, Rose writes, “If you have designed the cockpit to fit the average pilot, you have actually designed it to fit no one.”

The author goes on to explain how many systems built for the average person have met and are meeting similar fates. Even the human brain, an organ that may look on the outside like an interchangeable part, defies averaging. One might like to assume that most people's brains should be fairly close to average. Neuroscientists certainly expected that at least some brains should be similar to the average. But studies of human brains have found that no single brain seems to even remotely resemble “the average brain.”

“The implications are hard to ignore: if you build a theory about thought, perception, or personality based on the average brain, then you have likely built a theory that applies to no one. The guiding assumption of decades of neuroscience research is unfounded. There is no such thing as an average brain.”

Uh-oh for education.

It is at this point that the author begins laying the groundwork for the radical proposals for change in education that he will conclude the book with. He begins with an excursion back in time to where the groundwork for the present system was laid. The mathematician, Adolph Quetelet (b. 1796)

In the 1840s, Queteley calculated the average chest size of a Scottish and then concluded that each individual Scottish soldier's chest size represented an instance of naturally occurring error, whereas the average chest size represented the size of the true soldier – a perfectly formed soldier, free from any physical blemishes or disruptions, as nature intended a soldier to be. For Queteley, The average man was perfection itself, an ideal that nature aspired to, free from error with a capital E. He declared that the greatest men in history were closest to the average man of the place and time. Quetelet’s invention of the average man marked the beginning of what Rose calls, “the Age of Average.” Western Societies began designing systems as though the average person were the “purpose” ever since.

Here, Rose’s story turns to another mathematician, Francis Galton.

“Galton concurred with Queteley that the average represented the scientific foundation for understanding people. In fact, Galton agreed with almost all of Queteley's ideas, save one: the idea that the average man represented natures ideal. Nothing could be further from the truth, claimed Galton. For him to be average was to be mediocre, crude, and undistinguished.”

Where Quetelet would have argued that both the person 50 percent smaller and the person 50 percent bigger were “errors” of form, Galton insisted that being over average made you superior. He also believed that in almost all cases, to be superior in one trait was highly likely to make you superior in all. “The best qualities are largely correlated,” he argued in 1909. Galton is the person we owe the most to when we see ideas of “rankings” embedded into our education systems. Galton is the one who we might turn to and praise or blame when we see colleges picking Freshman classes by evaluating their SAT scores only. A school designed by Galton would focus on a curriculum designed to “sort” students into their appropriate places so that society can put them to best use – in management – on the shop floor – bagging groceries. It is a system that is built on the notion that if you are below average on a test, you are intrinsically below average in all ways.

And now, we look at the historical process by which Quetelet’s and Galton’s ideas were embedded into the system and that starts with the statistician and management “expert,” Frederick Winslow Tayler and the Educational Psychologist and author Edward Thorndike.

“There is a rock upon which many an ingenious man has stranded, that of indulging in his inventive faculty,” Taylor warned in 1918, “It is thoroughly illegitimate for an average man to start out to make a radically new machine, or method, or process to replace one which is already successful.” IN a 1906 lecture Taylor explained how he saw the relationship between workers and managers, “”In our scheme, we do not ask for the initiative of our men. We do not want any initiative. All we want of them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say and do it quick.”

“In 1918, Taylor doubled down on these [averagarian] ideas, dishing out similar advice to aspiring mechanical engineers: "every day, year in and year out, each man should ask himself, over and over again, two questions: first, what is the name of the man I am now working for? And what does this man want me to do? The most important idea should be that of serving the man who is over you his way not yours.”

This argument was soon being applied in factories all over the country and would soon make its way into educational reform movements as well. Educational Taylorists insisted that the purpose of schools was to prepare average men to work in the new economy.

“I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” – John D Rockefeller

“In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.” – Frederick T Gates

As American business moved towards the controlled workshop floor, writer Edward Thorndike believed that the schools that prepared workers for those floors should be sorting young people

“according to their ability so that they could efficiently be appointed to their proper station in life, whether manager or worker, eminent leader or disposable outcast – and so that educational resources could be allocated accordingly. Thorndike's guiding axiom was quality is more important than equality.”

According to Rose,

“Thorndike agreed that every aspect of the educational system should be standardized around the average, not only because this would ensure standardized outcomes, as the Taylorists believed, but because it made it easier to measure each students deviation from the average – and thus made it easier to determine who is superior and who was inferior.”

“For Thorndike, the purpose of schools was not to educate all students to the same level, but to sort them, according to their innate level of talent.”

And thus the system that many of us are familiar with was born. A system that tested all to determine average and that started sorting those testers into bins from “gifted” to “useless.”

So what could be wrong with such a system? The first objection to “averagism” Rose suggests is “the Jaggedness principle.” The problem is that no one assessment can possibly be used to define a single person. There is no such thing as a person who is average on all counts.

Out of tens of thousands of players who have come through the NBA since 1950, Rose argues as an example, only five players have ever lead their team on all five crucial dimensions of determining excellence: Scoring, rebounds, steals, assists, and blocks.

Secondly, Rose argues that assessments in different contexts will always yield different results. “Behavior is not determined by traits or the situation, but emerges out of the unique interaction between the two. If you want to understand a person, descriptions of their average tendencies or essential nature are sure to lead you astray.” A kid tested on auto-mechanics through a paper test may score completely differently than a kid tested with a real car engine. A Navy Seal tested on a treadmill may not score as well when the same physical demands are placed on them underwater or while under fire. Rose uses the famous marshmellow test to demonstrate.

In the marshmallow test, young children are told that they can have a marshmallow right now or, if they are willing to wait fifteen minutes until the tester returns, they can have two. The tester leaves the room so that the child is faced with a single tempting marshmallow. The test is meant to determine which children have the executive function and fortitude to delay gratification. The results of the test can be completely skewed however by adding one small alteration. If children have been promised something that they did not receive just before they take this test, they will take the marshmallow with far greater frequency. That simple change to the experiment demonstrates that tests are always the result of an interaction between the tester and the circumstance. (By the way, I don’t even like marshmallows so I would have done well on this test.)

Rose insists in his chapter entitled “We All Walk the Road Less Traveled” that even the way we learn the most basic of skills defies uniformity. Researchers for instance, he says, have discovered there is no such thing as a normal pathway to crawling. Out of 28 different children who were meticulously observed learning to walk there were no less than 25 different pathways to success “each with its own unique movement patterns, and all of them eventually lead to walking.”

“Every baby solves the problem of movement in her own unique way.”

Rose’s central argument is that educational systems need to leave their addiction to the ideas of Quetelet, Galton, Taylor, and Thorndike behind. “

“The data confirms that the pace at which any given student learns is not uniform: we all learn some things quickly other things slowly, even within a single subject.”

The author argues that students have a right not only to access an education but they also have a right to and education that fits.

It is, no doubt, in this spirit that Vermont is implementing new educational reforms that require all its students to have a personalized education plan and to be given access to flexible pathways to an appropriate education for them. The author’s message is that students should no longer be restricted by the standard curriculum and graduation requirements. He would argue for a system of multiple certificates so that students can mix and match their way to the competencies that are organic to them.

“A self-determined, competency-based credentialing system is also more closely aligned with the principles of individuality. It fulfills the jaggednes principle, since it allows students to figure out what they like, what they are good at, and what is the best way to pursue these interests. It fulfills the context principal by evaluating students competency in a context as close as possible to the professional environment where they will actually perform. And if it fulfills the pathways principal by allowing each student to learn at their own pace, and follow the sequence that is right for them.”

Question for Comment: Can a single “system” continue to meet the needs of every student when the idea of the average student begins to be regarded as a heretical idea?

02/07/2016

Studs Terkel explained over 40 years ago what people wanted from their work efforts:

“It is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book."

In The Optimistic Workplace, Shawn Murphey tries to lay out a 90 day plan for introducing and maintaining a climate of optimism in one’s place of work. From the research that has been done on the subject, this may be one of the most important endeavors we Americans can undertake if we want to live happier lives. Most of us spend about eight hours sleeping, eight ours with our families and friends and private interests, and eight hours working. It stands to reason that if those eight hours of work leave us isolated, wounded, and wretched, the other sixteen hours are going to suffer from the toxicity we bring to them as well. People would do well to think more intentionally about the quality of the workplace environment. And Murphey tries to do exactly that.

He begins by looking at the sorts of managers and management styles that serve as nurseries for dissatisfaction, seeing these things as something akin to diseases that infect attitudinal health. The primary culprit, he says, comes down to a lack of care that leads to a lack of knowledge. He calls it “blind impact.” It is the habit of making decisions that impact other people and that are made without any knowledge of that impact. Employees begin to feel like their lives are being deeply impacted by people who do not know them or care to know them. “85% of Google employees believe their immediate leader is interested in them as a whole person,” Murphy writes,

“not just an employee. ... The relationship with the immediate boss is often a reason employees leave organizations. Unfortunately, connection and belonging are often found with the peers only.”

The second major cause of employee stress is lack of trust – the unwillingness to delegate to the employee the task of figuring out how to achieve the primary purposes of the company. “We have veered too far away from hiring and treating employees as mature, fully functioning adults” Murphey says,

“Stewards create workplace context that assume people can be trusted to do their best work and to do the right thing. We've gone too long in treating people as though they need to be controlled if we want them to do what we need.”

The author talks to some length about the implications of research done by Paul Zaks who studied the neuro-chemical impact of trust in human relationships. In one of his experiments, he paired up two people and gave each of them ten dollars. The first person in the pair is given an opportunity to give some of his money to the second (a complete stranger in another room). The transaction takes place entirely through a computer. Participant one is informed that participant two will be given three times whatever dollar amount person one is willing to sacrifice for them. Participant one knows that participant two will be given a chance to give back money but participant two is under no compulsion to do so. One can imagine in an ideal world, participant one would give away all ten dollars – thus enriching participant two by thirty dollars. If participant two is so inclined, he could give back twenty dollars and both would have doubled their original stash. But participant two could simply walk away with forty, thus quadrupling their original gift at the complete expense of the “sucker” who trusted them.

In Zak’s experiment, he took blood samples of both participants right after they made their decisions to see if there was some chemical cause for people’s generosity. What he discovered is that people actually are physically affected by the extension of another person’s trust (it has to do with Oxytocin). Being trusted generally induces those who are trusted to be trustworthy. Zaks found that 85% of people in the person one role sent some money. Those who received the money reciprocated 98% of the time.

The implications for creating an optimistic workplace are self-evident. Extending trust and reciprocating it with trustworthiness is the engine that makes an optimistic workplace work.

Another factor in the creation of optimistic workplaces involves the recognition of purpose. People not only want to be paid for their work, they want their work to be meaningful. They want their work to be aligned with their values. “Work alignment occurs when each person on your team knows how her contributions align with the teams and organizations goals,” Murphey insists. “While this is a standard leadership belief, it is not often put in practice.” There is something gratifying about leaving the community and the world a better place. Thriving optimistic workplaces, the book insists, help people to actualize their potential to contribute. In one example that the author cites, the management of Menlo Park interview groups of potential employees by pairing them up and asking them to make their partner look good. By this means, they indicate that the primary trait they are looking for in their employees is the ability to learn and to collaborate for the general welfare of the whole. Each week, employees are paired up with different partners and set to various tasks. They supervise themselves in completing them.

The last thing that I will touch on has to do with the way that work interacts with people’s private and family lives. “For centuries,” Murphey argues,

“organizations have put into place human resources practices and followed management philosophies that unnaturally advocated for employees to separate their personal lives from their professional ones.”

Organizations that simply look at the pursuit of happiness as the “pursuit of stuff” – who regard profits as the sole factor in decision making are kidding themselves. People have lives outside of work as well as at work and if success at the one demands failure at the other, they are not ever going to feel optimistic about work or family. Workplace optimism is profoundly impacted by non-workplace satisfaction – just as happiness in the domestic life can be profoundly enhanced or damaged by a toxic workplace environment. According to this book, managers (Murphey refers to them as “stewards”) who disregard the importance of how their employees work lives are impacting and being impacted by their personal family lives are short sighted. They will soon find that their employees move on to working situations where they are regarded holistically.

There are many more ideas and suggestions in the book but these are a few that stuck out to me. Perhaps because they affect me personally as well as professionally.

Question for Comment: How healthy is the environment where you work? Do you look forward to going to work as much or more than you look forward to going home after work? Why? Who is responsible and to what extent are you responsible?

02/03/2016

Appreciative Advising is a system of student advising that attempts to break down the mission into its logical sub-units in a usable way. The system, it should be said, begins with the assumption that advisers actually care about their advisees as that is really the central ingredient with which the various tasks must be infused. Obviously the quality of the institution in which the advising is done will matter greatly but there is always room, even in imperfect institutions for “pockets of greatness.”

So, here is the progression as the authors of this system see it

First comes the “disarming” phase where new students are given a chance to feel comfortable, to engage with their adviser on a personal level and establish a safe place to be honest with one another.

At this point, the relationship can move into a “discovery” phase where students get to tell their stories and explain who they are and how they arrived at college.

Having a fuller knowledge of what is, advisers are better situated to help students make their way through the “dreaming” phase. What is their vision for where they want to be eventually?

Now we are ready to “design” the pathway to that goal. This can involve far more than the simple selection of courses. It might involve internships, clubs, community service ideas, or the building of networks and key relationships.

Once the blueprint is in place (and it can always be modified), the adviser turns into the coach who helps to “make the plan happen.” Through encouragement, insight, reflection, and support, the adviser engages in the “delivering” phase with the student, ever modifying but moving towards their goal.

Appreciative Advising model includes a final phase they call “Don’t settle.” As they say, the last ten percent of a job is ninety percent of the job. Advisers stick with students through the difficult process of finishing – particularly those parts of the plan that were the easiest to procrastinate on.

The book is a quick read and provides multiple examples of how the above process can be implemented.

Question for Comment: Which of these phases of the process do you think you would have the most to offer a college student? Which is the most difficult for you?